[Brand Analysis] Deconstructing Red Bull’s Marketing Strategy and Its TikTok Popularity

Saying you’d be given to portray Red Bull’s brand personality using only three characteristic traits. What would those be?

Throughout the brand’s many years of existence, through all its marketing and communication endeavors, Red Bull tried to position itself as a visionary, fresh and energetic brand. Which is highly desirable for a business in the energy drink industry, right?

From leveraging TikTok, the most popular social media platform of the moment, to ingeniously using influencer marketing, moving forward, we’ll deconstruct and dive into some of Red Bull’s most successful marketing strategies.

Are you ready?

Red Bull's marketing strategy

1. Red Bull on TikTok

• The brand centered its strategy around storytelling

2. Red Bull on Instagram

• Red Bull is not afraid of experimenting with Instagram Reels

3. Red Bull and its YouTube Shorts

• The brand creates dedicated content for each short-form video platform leveraged to reach multiple audiences

4. Performance stats for Red Bull’s social media strategy

5. Key takeaways from Red Bull’s marketing strategy

• Red Bull's social media strategy is centered around the brand's core promise
• The brand adapts to the newest trends and has heavily shifted toward a video-first approach in its social content

1. Red Bull on TikTok

When peeking at Red Bull’s TikTok channel, the wow factor is easily recognizable.

Featuring videos of professional athletes and sports enthusiasts engaged in extreme sports sessions and stunts, Red Bull’s TikTok strategy is entirely centered around the concept of storytelling.

@redbull Replying to @user094488082 no doubt we'd have a 5-star rating 🤘 #redbull #givesyouwiiings #f1 #uber #ride ♬ original sound - Red Bull

Known for its long association with extreme sports - like Formula One, Red Bull has extended the brand’s already contoured story, adding one more chapter to it with the launch of its TikTok account.

As a brand that targets highly energetic persons, adventure lovers, and adrenaline seekers through its TikTok channel - instead of having a hard product and sales approach - Red Bull tries to rather emphasize its connection with such personalities.

@redbull try and find a big wave more insane than Nazaré in Portugal, we *dare* you 🌊 #redbull #givesyouwiiings #wave #nazare #surfing #bigwave #portugal #surftok #facts ♬ original sound - Red Bull

For Red Bull, the key strategy that turned the brand into the huge success it is today was breaking out of the norm with its marketing initiatives.

@redbull only one way to get to the top of this 15m drop #redbull #givesyouwiiings #bike #bikelife #weird #elevator ♬ original sound - Red Bull

With Red Bull being such an unconventional brand (as proved by their past publicity stunts), TikTok seems to be the platform that fits like a glove because of its looking-for-authenticity audience.

On TikTok, Red Bull’s current strategy generates not only incredible view rates and a gigantic number of followers but also an engagement rate of 10.00% on average.

PS: To see what’s the average engagement rate on TikTok for different industries, check out our social media industry benchmarks study!

2. Red Bull on Instagram

Understanding how much it matters for the nowadays social audiences to be entertained through video content, besides launching its TikTok channel, Red Bull also decided to adjust its Instagram strategy accordingly.

Fully taking advantage of Instagram’s push on Reels, the brand rapidly embraced this new feature and, sooner rather than later, started creating more and more Reels.

Actually, according to the data dug up using Socialinsider, it seems that Instagram Reels make up most of Red Bull’s Instagram posts.

From a creative concept point of view, Red Bull’s Instagram Reels are pretty similar to its TikTok videos; these also portray athletes performing different extreme sports.

From a glance, it would appear the only differentiator between the brand’s Reels and its TikTok videos lies in the scenes and situations depicted.

3. Red Bull and its YouTube Shorts

Just like with Instagram Reels, Red Bull quickly started integrating YouTube Shorts into its short-video content plan quickly after the feature's launch.

With such a 360 video content strategy, Red Bull is sure to get on the radar of every platform's audience, gaining huge visibility.

Red Bull is in it to win it when it comes to getting the brand's targeted audience's attention by capitalizing on all the major video networks' viewership potential.

As the data pulled from the Socialinsider app has shown, the brand's channel video views have continuously increased since it started incorporating Shorts into its YouTube marketing strategy.

What is fascinating about Red Bull's video marketing strategy is that although the main video concept remains the same for all platforms used, the brand's content is unique on all three channels.

Moreover, every single video posted on a specific platform is very well adapted to that specific network's audience and style.

Judging by the number of views each of Red Bull's YouTube Shorts has recorded and by the brand's overall YouTube performance, integrating this type of content seems to have been a smart move.

According to data, Red Bull registers an average YouTube engagement rate of 0.70%, which is pretty impressive.

4. Performance stats for Red Bull’s social media strategy

While Redbull’s marketing strategy for social media relies heavily on video content, as mentioned earlier, whether or not this was the smartest move is to be determined by looking at data.

And what better way to look at the numbers than comparing them with those of the competitors’, to gain a deeper understanding of the social landscape, right?

Therefore, let’s quickly look at a side-by-side comparison of a couple of Red Bull’s Instagram KPIs against the ones of one of the brand’s main competitors - Monster Energy.

From a glance, it would seem that Red Bull's marketing strategy is the more effective one, given that it helped the brand gain both a bigger fanbase and increased engagement.

However, when conducting a competitive analysis, it's equally important to keep in mind that different businesses can have different objectives for the same social media channel.

All in all, the numbers can indicate the more successful social media strategy only up to some extent.

But with social media marketing being so complex, thanks to the many and increasing social platforms that rise every couple of years, it's hard to establish the effectiveness of a brand's social media strategy by looking at only one channel.

That's why we'll take our analysis further and run a performance comparison between Red Bull and Monster Energy for TikTok as well.

Judging by the numbers, it seems that in TikTok's case as well, Red Bull's marketing strategy has the upper hand against Monster Energy's from multiple KPI perspectives,  from generating more engagement and plays to a higher following.  

If you're curious about how you can equally get your competitor's social media data just as easily, let me walk you through the steps I took when doing this competitive analysis using Socialinsider.

1. First, I added Red Bull's and Monster Energy's Instagram and TikTok profiles into Socialinsider by clicking the "Add social profiles" button, by inserting the accounts' URLs.
2. Then I selected Red Bull's Instagram account from the left-sided list of profiles previously added.
3. After selecting the "Compare" section from the top menu, I chose the second Instagram account that I wanted to include in my comparison by selecting one of the profiles suggested that were added during step 1.

And just like that, I had my competitive analysis ready with just a couple of clicks.

This type of head-to-head comparison is available for multiple platforms in case you want to spy on your competitors' multiple channels' performance.

5. Key takeaways from Red Bull’s marketing strategy

Red Bull's social media strategy is inspired by and in sync with the brand's motto - "Red Bull gives you wings".

Through its combined marketing campaigns - some more unconventional than others - Red Bull has succeeded in becoming the top-of-mind brand for its core audience - young adults who are looking for an energy boost.

As for some strategy insights that got Red Bull's nowadays, the main takeaways would be the followings:

• Red Bull makes heavy use of storytelling;
• The brand puts its audience first - by creating content with which its followers and communities could resonate;
• RedBull has a video-oriented content strategy;
• the brand quickly adapts to the newest trends.

Final thoughts

Thanks to a clever marketing strategy, Red Bull became the leading brand in its industry and gained a tremendous community on all the major social media platforms.

To see what tactics other popular brands on TikTok have leveraged lately, you can take a look at our brand analysis of Duolingo's TikTok strategy or Ryanair's creative concept for its TikTok account.